System-Level Max Power (SYMPO) - A Systematic Approach for Escalating System-Level Power Consumption Using Synthetic Benchmarks

To effectively design a computer system for the worst case power consumption scenario, system architects often use hand-crafted maximum power consuming benchmarks at the assembly language level. These stressmarks, also called power viruses, are very tedious to generate and require significant domain knowledge. In this paper, the authors propose SYMPO, an automatic SYstem level Max POwer virus generation framework, which maximizes the power consumption of the CPU and the memory system using genetic algorithm and an abstract workload generation framework. For a set of three ISAs, they show the efficacy of the power viruses generated using SYMPO by comparing the power consumption with that of MPrime torture test, which is widely used by industry to test system stability.